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Not Out of the Woods Yet

Like a lot of things, the application appointment didn’t go completely as planned. If anyone cares to learn from my mistakes, my recommendation is to spend what will probably equate to about £75 and get an accountant with one of the following at the end of their name:

Requirements for accountants

If you are providing evidence from an accountant or accountancy firm, they must be either a fully qualified chartered accountant or a certified accountant who is a member of a registered body.

If your earnings were for work done while you were in the UK, the evidence must come from an accountant or accountancy firm in the UK who is a member of a recognised supervisory body:

the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW);

the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Scotland (ICAS);

the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland (ICAI);

the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA);

the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA);

Institute of Financial Accountants (IFA); and

the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA).

If you made your earnings while you were not in the UK, the evidence must come from a member of one of the above supervisory bodies, or from a full member of theInternational Federation of Accountants.

This is vitally important for those of you who have businesses or are otherwise self-employed; they will simply NOT accept anyone who is not a member of one of these groups.

Long story short: I’m lucky, the woman interviewing me is giving me TEN DAYS to get someone from one of the aforementioned bodies to review and confirm that the financials are correct. If I fail to do so, I can pretty much kiss the £900+ that we forked out goodbye and I won’t be getting my VISA approved.

The good news is that is actually doable – though it took some frantic calling around, we did manage to find an accountant that was both willing and and able to help today. We took everything we had over to him, he looked through it and said he would have it ready for us tomorrow afternoon. This man is officially my god today.

All in all, the whole day has been a roller coster ride that I would rather I had skipped; but the worst of it is already over and, unless the reviewer decides to be super-cruel to us and rejects it out of spite somehow (knock on wood), I will probably have an approval by the end of next week.

But yeah, don’t be like me and leave it up to chance: the person reviewing it could have just as easily rejected it and that would have been that, but she was willing to give us a chance, and I’m grateful that she was being fair about it. It doesn’t help that I’m a nervous wreck (all things considered, I think I’m dealing with that well), but it could still be worse. Moral of the story: Don’t leave a single thing to chance if you can help it – the extra mile is worth walking ahead of time; it will save you a lot of pain and heartache.